Today was the release of the Festival of the Lost event in Destiny Rising, and I have to admit I have been looking forward to this. Festival of the Lost was hands down my favorite event to occur in Destiny 2, and it always had some kind of cool trick or treat theming, and while the masks were entirely cosmetic it was still cool to collect them. So I have to admit I am more than a little disappointed in the event that we got. Since October 23rd when the roadmap of content for the event dropped, it was teased that we would be getting some sort of activity starting on the 30th and continuing through until November 13th. I had hopes this would be really cool, and maybe offer something interesting to chase.
Today is the 30th and the event has started, and effectively what we get… is a rebranding of Singularity in the Realm of the Nine for the Festival called the Haunted Singularity. Over the next ten days they are releasing a new section of the event, and each day you have access to run it once on Normal mode and once on Challenge mode where you can gain limited quantities of bulk resources. You also gain a currency called Eerie Amber that you can collect 15 per day, which then unlocks 8 Moebius Clusters over the course of the event, and at 100 Amber collected you get a Hive Pumpkin mask cosmetic. All of which would honestly be fine if the event were enjoyable.
The problem that I have is that the Realm of the Nine is fun, because it allows you to stack a bunch of overpowered abilities and see just how fast you can decimate the waves. Part of the process of unlocking Trial of the Nine is spending points on this talent tree of sorts, that allows you to reroll modifiers if you get three that are bummers. Unfortunately the Haunted Singularity doesn’t have access to those perks and you pretty much are stuck with whatever you get for choices. Most of these take away powers, and instead replace them with ways to collect candy. So it means you are effectively taking way the fun portion of Realm of the Nine and replacing them with a candy grind. I will do these each day, but largely out of a general feeling of obligation rather than enjoyment. I will chain run Realm of the Nine Chaos mode for the pure love of the event, even if I am not getting good rewards for doing so.
So you are probably thinking… Hey Bel, what about the candy grind? Does it give you anything good? I mean technically you get a Season of Daybreak Engram for each Candy Bucket that you craft. It takes 200 candy to craft a bucket, and these give you one guaranteed Engram and 60 Bright Dust. Both of which feel like they are pretty underwhelming rewards. If you have not opened many Seasonal Engrams, then I guess this might be a way of getting them, Generally speaking however they mostly just reward stickers and weapon shaders, with the rare chance at maybe getting a weapon skin. I hope they improve these for the next season because they have largely felt like a pointless grind. The only thing unique or interesting in this event is that Pumpkin Helmet, which I will get because I am that kind of dumb… but it isn’t necessarily something I am excited to be doing.
The other thing that is somewhat frustrating about the event is that new players are largely going to be excluded from the heroic content. It suggests 65k light in order to run it, and that is honestly not the easiest thing to acquire in the world. New lights are absolutely not going to be able to participate, and for the tryhards… I am not really sure there is anything in this event that is that worth chasing. Admittedly we are all probably going to get the pumpkin hat, because it exists… but I am hoping that maybe they add something else to the later phases of the event because neither the candy grind or any of the rewards from it seem that interesting.
On the more positive side of things, we did get a preview of what the next season is going to look like. We are getting a new map, new gauntlet blitz, and new activities. Additionally Maru, which is a character from the closed testing phases is going to be available. However I believe she has effectively the same weapon loadout as Ikora, so I am not really sure it is going to be worth chasing. It looks like maybe there is an exotic associated with her that we are getting skins for as well. I mean a new map will be pretty great, and that more than anything is what the game needs… new areas to explore and new things to do. However they also really need to go through the content that is not being played, and give it some chase drops that give people reasons to play it. Trials of the Nine Chaos mode is so good because even without any of the daily pinnacle rewards, you still have a chance at getting exotic artifacts… albeit really slim.
In the funny side of things… I spent the pull currency that I got from the event and for the maintenance patch and got my last Ikora needed to have a fully decked out version. Again… she is quite possibly the worst character currently in the game, but we have fun playing her. I also have a fully talented out version of Finnala, which is similarly not a great character and mostly a worse version of Wolf. I am looking forward to my time away from the game playing Path of Exile, and I am hoping when I drop this game down into maintenance mode levels of play… it will get better and I will be excited to come back to it. Likely still going to keep doing dailies, but today I could not be bothered with trying to get three new lights to interact with me for the mentor quest.
I think I might just be grumpy and disappointed. Though that said, I cannot see anyone excited about the Festival of the Lost in this state.
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